If using this technology will increase the flow of customers and ease customers buying experience...I'm for this.

I'm considering building a site for this. The SEO implications are important, but even more than that (to me) is the affiliate situation here. I know my sites are getting traffic, and I'm not seeing any results which come even close to matching the traffic. If linkovers are accurate, then they're not clicking into Zazzle as often as I'd like; if linkovers aren't accurate, they may be clicking, and I'm not getting the Referrals.

Time to try something new, I think.

You mean the free WP.com sites, yes? Those sites are akin to, say, Blogger or one of the other blogging sites.

A website which uses the WP platform (aka WP.org) should work just fine. These sites are independent of the WP organization, and simply use WP as a content management system.

I could never get any iFrame to work on WordPress - and I'm not on the .com. If you know a trick I would love to know it too.

Ah, sorry to hear you left, I just followed you the other day, I guess they didn't know you were gone yet? anyway I am going to give it a try... it can't do any worse than my RB...

I use WP hosted on BlueHost with a site from Wp.org. I can't use iFrame on there either. I could be wrong but it's a moot point for me now.

Shelli Opps

That sounds neat.... I'll have to check out Weebly! I was previously on Wix with my old website and they have a shop option - but I found Wix in general was too slow to load and so I didn't renew when the time came along. The tabs option with weebly seems like a good workaround for a zazzle cart though.

Its good that there is a free plan you can start with though, because then you can see if you like the platform well enough to pay for it! Great that you have been using the free one for years too, and that they provide enough content in their free version to do that. I've never had a website I liked enough to stick to... except my blogger blog which I can't seem to move to wordpress. XD

But I agree, if there was ever a Zazzle shopping cart I would be building myself a new website and installing that in a heartbeat!

back on topic... this might be the deal breaker for having one on Zazzle.

Sadly search engines don't read frames, iframes or javascript. So this does not help with the search engines.

Also iframe and javascripts that load partial storefronts or processing widgets can be quite slow to load on a page in my experience and should be avoided.

From past experience with FFA, Spreadshirt and other sites this can add up to 10 seconds of page load times. First you page has to load, then the script has to contact the offsite server to load the page and the browser must then build the page in the frame.

What is required is a PHP script which tends to be much faster and that adds all the product code onto your page which search engines can scan and index.

But you need to remember that, your site is at the mercy of the sending server; if it goes down or has a lot of activity that frame may take a very long time to load or not load at all.

Even using PHP scripts like the Zazzle store builder can be problematic, due to server issues or changes made on the Zazzle site which can render the script in-operable.

That's why now I just create my art on my site, add content for it and have a drop down link that says where to purchase (I use several POD sites). If you're using just zazzle then have a link to the category for that artwork or create a list of links (more work) where the visitor can purchase your product(s).

When you do this make sure you include your associate id in the link so that you can earn referral credit if your visitor purchases something else from another store.

Also in your links make sure to include the rel="nofollow" in the link so that search engines stay on your site when they are indexing it and do not hightail it off to zazzle as they scan the links (You can get around this using a javascript link).


Here's a basic example of how your link should look:


<a href="https://www.zazzle.com/z/ypqho?rf=238342918392304306" rel="nofollow" target="zazzle_site" title="Angel Wing Sword Of Arkledious DGS Acrylic Print" /><b>Angel Wing Sword Of Arkledious DGS Acrylic Print</b></a><br />

target can be:
_new
_blank
_top
name01_name01 (like above)

<b></b>: opening and closing bold tags. You can also use <strong></strong> which now is the preferred method

<br />: is the line break if you are listing more than one active link below another.

the title: isn't necessary, but it may help with SEO depending on the search engine; it also allows the browser to display the link title (Use if you active link says Order Here, Buy Now, Claim Yours).

Generally speaking if you are getting the links directly from the Zazzle link widget on the product page this is already taken care of for you.

There's something to be said SEO-wise for keeping people on our pages instead of bouncing them to Zazzle, regardless that the content isn't read, and I think that's what OP is referencing.

Something to consider, for sure.